Blackwell Reference Online

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In Denis Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), the genie Cucufa reaches into his pocket and finds a mess of everyday objects – a half-sucked candy, toy pagodas made of lead, wheat crumbs, “images,” and a silver ring (chapter 4). In this assemblage I find a miniature history of the novel. Here is exactly the “reality-effect” most valued as novelistic, the rendering of everyday, insignificant objects through which an entire character streams, for example the waistcoat that Richardson's Pamela embroiders for her employer and future husband Mr. B., or Uncle Toby's fragile clay pipe in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67). These objects are tucked away and have to be fished out. Novelistic truth is buried in pockets (as here), in packets – as in epistolary novels that involve purloining and breaking open private letters – and in plackets, as in the famous scenes where Pamela sews her journal into her underwear “about her Hips,” forcing Mr. B. to search her (120, 198). In Diderot's case the pocket location is especially apt, since the collection of random objects includes the famous magic ring that generates the entire novel and the entire “discourse of sexuality” according to Foucault – the ring that makes the genital organs speak.Genies and magic rings are not supposed to feature in the canonical “realistic” novel as defined by Ian Watt and the Anglo-monoglot school, though preposterous ... log in or subscribe to read full text